In the face of enormous changes in our ecological niches, we will move as if trying to attune to a wild and crazy lover. Nature has its cold-hearted unnerving side, and mankind has developed means of coping with this aspect of our existence. Some of which were superstitions, and now science. It is not a system that guarantees our survival. But with the mechanism of emergence of novelty as a prime feature of Nature we have limited abilities to predict our future. Our future has grown even less predictable as the Earth has heated up far faster than our initial predictions. What pieces can we pull together to maintain some sanity and joy in being alive? We must include the acceptance of destruction of even that which we hold very dear, and with our suffering persist in pushing the edges of our survivability and the survivability of other life forms.
What has kept things a bit lighter for me is realizing that microbes are the most prevalent and persistent life forms on Earth, and I am mostly microbes. Ok self-microbes, how do I keep you alive and well? And when faced with the possibility that “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” ---that brings forth the song by Bachman Turner Overdrive, from 1974. Good ol’ Rock ‘n Roll!
I met a devil woman
She took my heart away
She said, I've had it comin' to me
But I wanted it that way
I think that any love is good lovin'
So, I took what I could get, mmh
Oooh, oooh she looked at me with big brown eyes
Well, I know some people have difficulty relating to the Earth and there are stories of a hell deep inside the Earth, so what if we are meeting Earth as a “devil woman” who can entrance us? I have fallen in love with Earth, so have others. We certainly are due for some karma in how we’ve treated the Earth. But most of us wouldn’t change, so “we” wanted it that way---What the Earth has to do to get our attention to change! And any love the Earth can get and any love that we can give is good. We’ve already taken what we could get, now how about giving back so we can dance a more joy-filled dance with our life-giving and life-filled Earth. Yes, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The next lesson is an understanding of ecosynthesis. This isn’t how to live on another planet, like Mars. It has applications to how to adapt and evolve our adaptation to our Earth and observe its own ecosynthesis in action. Ecosystems are not fixed and ancient systems. They are dynamic and constantly evolving, hence ecosynthesis.
Holmgren in Permaculture Principle and Pathways, pg. 258 ff, offers a more useful definition of ecosynthesis. What makes up an ecosystem is “remarkably plastic, with new relationships and adaptations leading to rapid ecosystem evolution.…we hope that the self-organisational power of nature can be enhanced and augmented to create functional human ecosystems in relatively few generations….Because of this ubiquity of self-organisation and system evolution, even the most carefully planned and controlled biological system will change…If we can develop more open, flexible and interactive processes for planning, design and management, we are more likely to see the benefits from wild nature and human complexity.…the transformation comes when we no longer see ourselves as outside nature. To make this final step, we must first set aside the judgments about our actions being good or bad. Then we can see the examples of ecosynthesis all around us as nature at work.”
From ecosynthesis, I am drawn into exploring the concept of antifragility. It fits. Especially since “I ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything … by suppressing randomness and volatility. … stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed “Soviet-Harvard delusions” in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most (see iatrogenics).
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Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
from fs.blog/… about: Nassim Taleb’s book: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder:
Is it part of our nature to have the capacity for antifragility? Can our communities be more antifragile? I believe so. Our prefrontal cortex helps us be more sociable. Is this the way nature encourages our antifragility?
www.theguardian.com/… is a review of Talib’s book which isn’t full of praise. But honest criticism has the potential of making one less fragile. So does walking into a metaphorical wall in your world predictions and learning something more about yourself and the world.
The core idea behind this book is simple and quite enticing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world and all that's in it (people, things, institutions, ways of life) into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile. You are fragile if you avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life: you think you are keeping safe, but really you are making yourself vulnerable to the shock that will tear everything apart. You are robust if you can stand up to shocks without flinching and without changing who you are. But you are antifragile if shocks and disruptions make you stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge you face. Taleb thinks we should all try to be antifragile.
Learning from Nature, which is what permaculture promotes, teaches about antifragility. Observe not just for resilience but for what thrives despite difficult conditions. So, sure, avoid flooding, avoid fire, avoid increasing winds….or put yourself into the mix and learn what works and what doesn’t. Nature will survive because it incorporates death into new life, but our technologies are fragile. permaculturenews.org/...
Our hearts are fragile too. In our losses and the losses we will witness, we learn to hold our heartache and appreciate life even more. Thereby we become more antifragile.
“The problem is the solution” ala Bill Mollison, father of permaculture, is better understood as reframing the problem helps us see the solution. His example was “You don’t have a snail (or slug) problem, you have a duck deficiency!” tcpermaculture.com/… So, what if we don’t have a climate crisis, we have a fragile man-made ecosystem? What are the antifragile solutions to our predicaments?
What can we change and what must we accept in the ecosynthesis that happens with and without us? What will we gain from going through this chaos of rapid climate change? We might gain a common view of ourselves as world-centered, not self- or tribe- centered. It may form the ground of our next shared reality, one that is less fragile than our current shared reality.
“What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows, the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.”
Sri Aurobindo [Thoughts and Aphorisms]